


- sic itur ad astra - such is the way to the stars -

by otter



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-14
Updated: 2011-08-14
Packaged: 2017-10-22 15:10:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/239402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/otter/pseuds/otter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Getting by in a world of finite resources. More or less.</p>
            </blockquote>





	- sic itur ad astra - such is the way to the stars -

When Rodney sat down -- a little too calmly, considering he'd entered the room at a sprint -- he said, "I've been here for the last twenty minutes. In case anyone asks."

John raised an eyebrow and put down his sandwich. It didn't actually taste much like turkey, anyway. "McKay?" he said, and he managed to insert a few layers of inquiry and reprimand into the word with no additional syllables.

Rodney waved one hand dismissively, and used the other to steal one of John's crackers. "Relax," he said. "It's nothing. Well, nothing they'll be able to prove, anyway."

"McKay," John said again, using his eyebrows to signal his seriousness. He took back his cracker, even though Rodney had already eaten half of it.

"Major," Rodney said. "Do you happen to have a background in black ops?"

"Black ops?" John repeated dumbly.

Rodney took advantage of his bewilderment to steal another cracker, and popped the whole thing into his mouth this time; he nodded his head and chewed merrily, making a little happy face and a little happy noise at the same time.

"Yeah," he mumbled, around the food in his mouth. "You know, covert... stuff."

John pulled his tray a little closer to himself and a little further away from Rodney. "If I were black ops," he said, "the punishment for cracker theft would probably be death by fork."

"That's too bad," Rodney said, "because we could've used those skills. Oh well. We'll still win, regardless." He started eyeing John's tray again.

"McKay," John said, "out of everything you've said since you sat down, absolutely none of it has made any sense." He gripped his fork and waved it menacingly when Rodney's hand started creeping across the table.

"You haven't heard?" Rodney said, and then he waved a hand at himself as if he was brushing away the question. "No, of course you haven't. You're the last one to know about _everything_." He looked around the empty mess hall, as if he was afraid that someone might overhear, but then he just said, "Be right back," and vanished into the kitchen. When he came back, he had an MRE in one hand and a cup in the other.

"You were saying?" John prompted.

Rodney was making that happy noise again, slitting open the long side of the MRE pouch with his boot knife. "We're almost out of MALPs," he said.

"Yes, Rodney, I've heard _that_ ," John said. "I was in this morning's senior staff meeting."

"Yes, yes." Rodney waved his fork in a surprisingly imperious fashion, considering that it was a fork and not, say, a scepter. "But you apparently _didn't_ hear about my brilliant solution to the problem."

John leaned back in his chair, slung an arm over the backrest and gave Rodney his best 'I so don't care about your geeky exploits' look. "Do tell," he said, in a tone which invited Rodney to keep it very short.

Rodney leaned in, clutched his fork and his pouch full of spaghetti with meat sauce like a conquering hero, and said, "Scrapheap challenge. We've got lots of spare parts lying around -- especially since Hale discovered that Ancient garbage dump last week -- and a whole bunch of scientists who, if their weekly reports are anything to go by, apparently don't have enough to do."

John raised an eyebrow, tipped his head and said, "So they're...?"

"Building new MALPs," Rodney said. He shoveled a forkful of spaghetti into his mouth, and then attempted -- with surprising success -- to talk around it. "Elizabeth's arranging some prizes to make it interesting. And since we keep losing MALPs to Gates that, as it turns out, are in _space_ , I've challenged the science staff to engineer something that could survey planets from orbit."

John said, "Huh," and drummed his fingers against the table. It actually did sound kind of interesting, not that he was going to admit to that or anything. "And this has what to do with me?"

Rodney paused mid-chew and blinked, like he was trying to figure out why John hadn't figured it out yet. "We're working in teams, obviously. You're my team."

"I don't remember joining a MALP-building team," John said. Sometimes he felt it was best to start with stating the obvious.

"Of _course_ you're on my team," Rodney said, in the same completely insane way that he sometimes said things like 'of _course_ I'm enjoying this freeze-dried reconstituted chicken.' "We're teammates already." He frowned like he was thinking, which deepened into a frown like he was annoyed. "Wait a minute, did somebody already ask you? You didn't join Zelenka's team, did you? That's just low, Major, and I have to say I'm pretty disappointed in Radek for even trying it, but the fact that you'd--"

"Nobody's asked me, Rodney," John interrupted. This felt rather uncomfortably like being asked to a high school dance, but John supposed it was better than being the one doing the asking.

He tapped his fingers again and thought about spending not only his working hours with Rodney, but his off hours too, huddled in some lab building a space-going MALP and trying not to let Rodney to erode the chain of command and good discipline by ordering John around.

He managed to hide the shudder, and said, "So you're trying to make Teyla and Ford build a MALP with you, too?" John pitied them. He really did, but he could pull rank. He was the city's military commander, and he usually had important military commanding things to do.

"Teyla and Ford?" Rodney snorted and gave John a look like he was the crazy one. "Are you kidding? I'd spend all my time explaining to Teyla what a robot is, and trying to keep Ford from blowing it up. You, on the other hand..."

Rodney gave him a look, the kind of look that said he'd figured something out and was feeling very smug about it. But Rodney looked like that pretty much all the time, so John was used to it.

"You," Rodney repeated, "seem like just the kind of guy who would've spent his teenage years trying to soup up the engine on some junky classic car." It was the sort of sentence that normally would've ended in an 'am I right?' but Rodney never needed to ask if he was right. Rodney was always right. Well, mostly.

"I wasn't allowed to drive when I was a teenager," John said. "Not after the Incident." He said it with a capital I and a slight wince, but didn't elaborate. "I did build quite a few remote-controlled planes, though."

"Well," Rodney said. "There you have it." He tucked back into his food as if they'd just settled something definitively. The spaghetti was gone now, but there was still cheese spread and cardboard masquerading as crackers, and apple sauce that probably didn't have any apples in it.

"I so am not helping you build a robot," John said, but when he put it that way it _really_ started sounding fun. He sort of wondered if they could give it laserbeams for eyes or something.

"Yes you are," Rodney said, and he slid his crackers across the table to John, as if to make up for the ones that he'd stolen.

John picked up the packaged crackers and tapped them against the table, thought about spending all his free time building a robot with Rodney, and said, "Well, okay."

+++

John really hadn't spent his teenage years tinkering with cars, but he had spent one particularly memorable summer trying to get his dad's old Chevy truck running again. His dad had even helped sometimes, both of them leaning into the engine and occasionally poking at things with tools, but mostly just standing shoulder to shoulder and talking about girls and airplanes and other safe subjects. It would've warmed his mother's heart to see the two of them bonding, if she'd still been around.

This wasn't anything like that, though. The two experiences were far enough apart without even considering how there were literally years and galaxies between them.

Rodney poked him in the ribs -- very hard, with an elbow -- and said, "Do you not know what a wrench is, or did I just not enunciate clearly enough?"

John handed over the wrench, somewhat belatedly, and scowled out of habit. "I thought Canadians were supposed to be polite," he said.

"Common misconception," Rodney said. "It's part of our plan to lull America into a false sense of security so you won't see the invasion coming." His voice was muffled because his face was pressed right up against the MALP's undercarriage, and his head was sort of twisted half-underneath it.

John said, "Hmm," and leaned back on his hands, tilted his face up toward the sky, blessedly unconcerned because he was beyond Canada's reach here, no matter what their intentions. The sky was clear and blue, there was enough of a breeze to keep the late afternoon sun from getting too oppressive, and this far out at the end of the pier -- yet another in a long series of Rodney's secret working locations to prevent MALP-related espionage activities -- he could look out at the water and imagine paddling out for the next wave, even if there weren't any.

It was all very relaxing, and somehow against all laws of the natural world, Rodney's presence somehow made it moreso.

"Hartley's team is building some kind of ridiculous lunar lander," Rodney said. "You should see those morons. That thing's not even going to make it through the Stargate, much less survive deployment on another planet." There was an ominous thunking sound from underneath the MALP, and then Rodney grunted and pulled his head out from underneath it. He had that little lopsided smile on his face that he got when he was planning to destroy someone both professionally _and_ emotionally. "And if they draw an orbital Stargate, then they're just screwed. Supposedly the thing's got multi-directional propulsion control, but I bet it just flies itself in circles."

"Speaking of flying," John said (drawled really, the way he'd learned from being raised on a steady diet of John Wayne), "When are we going to get this bird off the ground?"

Rodney put a proprietary hand on the MALP's fuselage and said, "Bird? And you're the man who's forbidden _me_ from naming anything."

Their MALP wasn't a MALP so much as it was a little UAV, built for flight in and out of atmosphere and with an anti-gravity component as secret sauce. Rodney had cobbled together the anti-gravity and propulsion thing from the remains of a discarded child's toy (also, he'd whooped like an idiot and done a strangely compelling little dance when he'd figured out exactly what it was he'd found in the junk pile), and John had built the body of the not-quite-plane from what he was convinced had once been a toaster. Their MALP didn't really have wings as such, just a few short fins to help keep it stable in atmosphere, but it was shaped a bit like a bicycle helmet and about the size of a Labrador. The little electric grappler that Rodney had attached to the back ("So teams can retrieve it with a Puddlejumper, even when it's in space; it'll snare the Jumper's hull like a magnet and hitch a ride home!") had taken on all the appearance of a tail, and made the robot look a bit like a family pet.

John loved it, and had secretly named it "The Flying Toaster of Doom," but he hadn't told Rodney that yet. He was planning to give it a custom paint job while Rodney wasn't looking.

"Anyway," Rodney said, "it isn't ready yet. We'll need to do no small number of tests just to make sure it isn't going to explode again" -- and that was where the 'of Doom' part of the name had come from, which was why Rodney paused long enough to grimace, obviously not having put last week's Incident with a capital I out of his mind -- "and then short test flights indoors, where it can't drop into the ocean, and then maybe, _maybe_ , I'll let you play with it."

John shrugged like it didn't really matter to him all that much, even though his fingers were practically itching for their little jury-rigged remote control. Rodney was making happy humming noises again, which John had discovered that he did quite often when he was working on something interesting and things were going well.

God help him, but John was starting to think it was cute.

"You know, Major," Rodney said, still bent over the MALP but more petting it than working on it now, "I must say I've been surprised by the enthusiasm you've dedicated to this project. I expected you to lose interest within a week."

John leaned back a little further, stretched out his legs, and said, "Oh, really?" while he squinted at Rodney in a vaguely offended manner.

"Well, I thought you'd get sick of me within a week, to be honest," Rodney said, as if he wasn't relentlessly honest all the time. "But hey, that's giving you real credit. Most people wouldn't have lasted a week."

John shrugged and leaned all the way back, sprawled on his back on the bare surface of the pier, with the sun on his face and some sea bird calling from somewhere nearby, and his friend right there beside him, not actually as annoying as most people thought he was. Only half that annoying, at least. "Most people don't know what they're missing," he said. He'd only meant to think it, but it came out anyway in all its soppy sentimental glory. John didn't wince, though; his father had tried to teach him to play the guitar once, and dad had kept saying, _Don't stop for your mistakes; keep playing through it._

John had never been much good at music.

"Really?" Rodney said. "Yeah. Well. Yeah." And that was when he leaned over and kissed John hard on the mouth.

"Hey," John said, when Rodney finally deigned to allow him to breathe again.

Rodney said, "What?" and kind of looked like he was thinking about kissing John again, maybe longer and harder.

John blinked and squinted -- simultaneously, even -- and frowned up at Rodney and then finally said, "Nothing. It just seemed like I should probably say something right then."

"Oh," Rodney said. He put a hand on John's chest and stared at it like he couldn't believe he'd just done that much, nevermind the whole kissing thing. "Okay." Then he did kiss John again, just like he'd obviously been planning, and his mouth tasted like the grape-flavored beverage powder that had come with his MRE picnic lunch.

When he finally pulled back again, he said, "Are you sure you actually _passed_ that MENSA test? They didn't just say that you did so they wouldn't hurt your feelings?"

John said, "Huh?" and when he licked his lips they tasted all grape-y.

"Audience participation is required," Rodney said, like he was speaking to a special child. "Unless you don't want to. Participate, I mean."

John said, "What?" which was probably why Rodney kissed him again, and slid a hand down across his stomach and oh, oh holy _fuck_...

"You made the whole MENSA thing up," Rodney accused, against John's mouth. His hands were opening up John's pants, and John was finally starting to realize that Rodney was about to seriously just molest the fuck out of him.

"Hey," John said again, and he sat up and stripped off his own jacket. "Not in front of the kids, Rodney."

The jacket landed exactly where John aimed it, flopping over the top of the at-the-moment-not-quite-Flying Toaster of Doom, but it didn't matter, because they never had gotten around to installing those laserbeam eyes, anyway.

the end


End file.
